The Nonpartisan Party is in

It’s no secret that the 2016 election is looming around the corner, and it seems to be getting quite competitive. With candidates like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton making an impression, it is getting more difficult for independent candidates to make a notable impression on America’s voters.

In order for candidates to get votes, the more extreme ends of the political party spectrum tend to be the most successful. To ensure a non-biased election, a free thinking, nonpartisan revolution needs to take place. This political party system of conservative versus liberal is destructive to our government because it limits freethinking and encourages favoritism.

Firm believers in the American tradition, such as The National Democratic Institute, believe that the competitive nature of elections offer voters vision for the opportunity of the future and offer venues for political participation. While this is a possibility, the showmanship and flash of political parties hinders the vision of America’s future rather than offering it. Whether it is mudslinging or passive aggressive ad campaigns, even candidates of the same political party resort to immature campaign strategies.

Rather, our election system should require all candidates to run with no political parties. These political parties emerged because most citizens as a whole are uniformed, disorganized, and disconnected; political parties are an easy way to bridge the gap between voters and government. A sense of community is often associated, but this sense of community often shifts into a sense of stubbornness that blocks our ability to vote for who we most closely agree with. Jane Mansbidge, a Harvard theorist carried out a study to examine polarization in Government. She found that members of congress are far more polarized than the voters. This concludes that members of congress are pressured to appeal to the extreme ends of the political spectrum.

Their functions in our government help develop policies, bundle demands from society into packages, and recruit candidates for legislative offices. But at what cost? While political parties have practical functions, journalists such as Todd Phillips with the Local Electors Foundation believe that the political system unrealistically expects each citizen to be informed about a government that is too distant and complex for them to comprehend Last election we spent $6,285,557,223 on congressional and presidential elections; it seems that perhaps our priorities in government are skewed. The reality is that even a perfect candidate will not be elected because selection is based on favoritism and nepotism instead of merit of the candidate.

As children, our parents encourage us to stay true to ourselves, but our culture has engrained a paradox that we must pick a side of either one extreme or another. These harmful mentalities pressures candidates such as Bernie Sanders, an Independent politician, to run as a democrat in order to even have a possibility of being successful.

Clearly, our election system is broken and complaining will not make it any better. However, that should not stop you from talking about it. Education on the views of the candidates in the 2016 election is critical; forming opinions based on whom one closely agrees with ensures an election that truly represents what America needs.